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Suppose you have seven dev teams of ten, plus a manager, tester, and a pm for each, plus an executive team of 9 people. 100 total people on the team. They each

Suppose you have seven dev teams of ten, plus a manager, tester, and a pm for each, plus an executive team of 9 people. 100 total people on the team. They each make an average of 200k a year. How many years will it take this team to recreate Discord? If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software. I think the point is that almost all of the value of Discord comes from the network effect of people locked in to using it. On the one hand, that's kind of a trivial observation, of course the users are value comes from. But, if you don't realize this, it's important to know. It means you that if even if you build something identical to Discord you're not going to be worth anything like as much - unless you also happen to get users. Or, put another way, you could build something technically worse, but if people adopted it for some reason, you'd be worth more.

lostmsu 6y ago
I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. No amount of dev + test + management can get that technology in 500 or 5000 years. You need researchers, and they need to be smart or lucky enough to give you a competitive result.
- charcircuit 6y ago
  What was attractive is that it had extremely low friction to onboard new members into a community. Click a link, type your name, and you are now a part of whatever community. Compare that to skype where you had to download a whole piece of software, register a new account, go to your email to activate your account, click the link for the community group chat, and then you can finally start talking in a single channel.
- kortilla 6y ago
  >I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. Discord is not popular because the technology is advanced. It got popular earlier on because the UIs for alternatives were garbage and they nailed the ease of multiple servers/channels/etc. The entire point is that discord could be easily reproduced from a software perspective. That won’t matter thought because the users won’t be on the new network and will have no incentive to switch.
  - b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago
    If Microsoft buys Discord I think several people would be looking to switch.
- xmprt 6y ago
  If you've never used Discord before, then it just feels like another chat application with a "gamer" theme. In reality, it's so much more and I think startups could actually do a lot more using Discord instead of Slack/Zoom. The UI is really simple to navigate. If you set up roles properly, it's really easy to automate certain things. There's a massive bot ecosystem. The voice, video chat, and screen share features are so much simpler to use than any other product I've used before. The thing that I find insane is that it's 100% free to use.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    I thought they collect a lot of data with desktop clients, including what apps you use and when.
    - charcircuit 6y ago
      There is an optional feature that let's you share what game you are currently playing to other people. It works by listing the current processes and matching against a preexisting list of games. If it finds a match it will set that as your current game assuming the setting for that is enabled.
  - wildpeaks 6y ago
    I did exactly this: initially I was going to go with Slack because the bots API was nicer and they had slash commands, but in the end Discord is just so much more pleasant to use, and it even started adding slash commands now. My one wish would be an easy way to handle multiple accounts.
    - k12sosse 6y ago
      Can't deny Microsoft finally nailed the single identity. It shows in teams b2b use.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  The next best thing IMO - Element - takes a few seconds to send and deliver a message and up to 10 seconds to initiate a voice call. Has no voice sub-rooms with auto voice detection, either.
- numpad0 6y ago
  It’s a free beer carbon copy of Slack except it uses single account for all instances. And they have the voice channel feature, but that’s kind of an aside.
  - pizza234 6y ago
    I wouldn't call it carbon copy. Slack's performance is abysmal (while Discord is relatively snappy), and this is, interestingly, toxic to Electron, as Slack is frequently used as reference to assert that Electron applications perform poorly.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software And what about Slack, Zoom or Coinbase? Are they $27B, $100B and $100B worth of software? What company is $x billions of dollars worth of software where x is their valuation? Even Google almost certainly isn't $1.3T (!) worth of software.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Yeah, what I'm saying is that companies are valuable or not based on their users (or what they earn) and not their software. Purchasing companies aren't paying X billion dollars for the code and assets. They are paying for the users. (Which, I also think is kind of obvious).
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    The users without the software have no value though. If you could theoretically sell just the user base would it be worth as much? It’s more like the user base and network effects are a multiplier of the software value.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Right, in that case I completely agree with you.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Well it can be users and/or features. A feature might give you an advantage in your bundle that you can't otherwise build.
  - bluecalm 6y ago
    As proven by among others Zoom, Whatsapp and now Discord if you build good software people will switch to it. I think you're undervaluing how good the software is. They are 5 years old, started from 0 user base and now they are a huge player and getting bigger by the day. You would have a point if there was something remotely close in quality on the market but not as popular but there just isn't. Discord is the first communication platform which doesn't suck in some obvious way. If Microsoft manage to buy it for 10B and not mess it up it will be one of their best acquisitions.
tomnipotent 6y ago
Complexity of software is not necessarily the only important dimension of determining value. The game industry is larger than both music and movies combined. Discord is behind almost every gaming community I've run into the last five years, from Eve Online to Valheim and Smash Bros. Looking for a Discord community is one of the first things I do when playing a new multiplayer game. Same with hundreds of millions of other gamers. You can't program your way into that kind of market adoption.
- charcircuit 6y ago
  That's his point. The main value is the userbase and not the software itself.
  - xmprt 6y ago
    That's about as profound as saying the value in Coke is the people buying it and not their secret formula and bottling machines.
    - ALittleLight 6y ago
      I never said it was profound, in fact, I said it was obvious. I called it a "trivial observation" - but it matters if you don't realize it. The Discord software isn't being bought and isn't worth 10 billion, probably not even 1 billion, but rather the totality of what Discord is (brand, users, data, etc).
    - usrusr 6y ago
      That's called brand and in one way or the other, in postindustrialized societies most people seem to work in that field (e.g. everything that is funded by ads is effectively part of the supply chain). "The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)
bluecalm 6y ago
Well, Microsoft has more engineers, money and can hire top talent. They also had a huge headstart in user base and adoption. What did they manage to come up with in a chat/collaboration space? Right - a total mess. Discord didn't "happen to get users". It made a platform people started using despite huge network/entrenchment effect of other players because it's so much better than everything else. I've learnt about Discord following open source projects and moved mine to it as well. It's fantastic, much much better than anything else on the market. Zoom is valued at 100b. Discord for 10 is just a steal. Coming back to your question: even if you multiply it by 10 and add infinite acquisition resources the team would most likely never be able to recreate Discord.
hu3 6y ago
You seem to think Discord can be recreated by throwing people and money at the problem. History shows it cannot. Discord is on another league in terms of technical and usability excellence when compared to competition.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  History shows that Large Companies tend to fail when recreating products because of internal politics and initiatives (outside of the core goal), not because they physically can't.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Aeolun 6y ago
> If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software. I think the problem is that this random group of people could never create Discord. They could create a superficially similar chat application, but it’s just as likely to be worse as better.
matkoniecz 6y ago
> If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software. If someone wants software now, rather than in 450 years it may be worth paying a premium.

lostmsu 6y ago

I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. No amount of dev + test + management can get that technology in 500 or 5000 years. You need researchers, and they need to be smart or lucky enough to give you a competitive result.

charcircuit 6y ago
What was attractive is that it had extremely low friction to onboard new members into a community. Click a link, type your name, and you are now a part of whatever community. Compare that to skype where you had to download a whole piece of software, register a new account, go to your email to activate your account, click the link for the community group chat, and then you can finally start talking in a single channel.
kortilla 6y ago
>I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. Discord is not popular because the technology is advanced. It got popular earlier on because the UIs for alternatives were garbage and they nailed the ease of multiple servers/channels/etc. The entire point is that discord could be easily reproduced from a software perspective. That won’t matter thought because the users won’t be on the new network and will have no incentive to switch.
- b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago
  If Microsoft buys Discord I think several people would be looking to switch.
xmprt 6y ago
If you've never used Discord before, then it just feels like another chat application with a "gamer" theme. In reality, it's so much more and I think startups could actually do a lot more using Discord instead of Slack/Zoom. The UI is really simple to navigate. If you set up roles properly, it's really easy to automate certain things. There's a massive bot ecosystem. The voice, video chat, and screen share features are so much simpler to use than any other product I've used before. The thing that I find insane is that it's 100% free to use.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  I thought they collect a lot of data with desktop clients, including what apps you use and when.
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    There is an optional feature that let's you share what game you are currently playing to other people. It works by listing the current processes and matching against a preexisting list of games. If it finds a match it will set that as your current game assuming the setting for that is enabled.
- wildpeaks 6y ago
  I did exactly this: initially I was going to go with Slack because the bots API was nicer and they had slash commands, but in the end Discord is just so much more pleasant to use, and it even started adding slash commands now. My one wish would be an easy way to handle multiple accounts.
  - k12sosse 6y ago
    Can't deny Microsoft finally nailed the single identity. It shows in teams b2b use.
Bancakes 6y ago
The next best thing IMO - Element - takes a few seconds to send and deliver a message and up to 10 seconds to initiate a voice call. Has no voice sub-rooms with auto voice detection, either.
numpad0 6y ago
It’s a free beer carbon copy of Slack except it uses single account for all instances. And they have the voice channel feature, but that’s kind of an aside.
- pizza234 6y ago
  I wouldn't call it carbon copy. Slack's performance is abysmal (while Discord is relatively snappy), and this is, interestingly, toxic to Electron, as Slack is frequently used as reference to assert that Electron applications perform poorly.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

> If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software And what about Slack, Zoom or Coinbase? Are they $27B, $100B and $100B worth of software? What company is $x billions of dollars worth of software where x is their valuation? Even Google almost certainly isn't $1.3T (!) worth of software.

ALittleLight 6y ago
Yeah, what I'm saying is that companies are valuable or not based on their users (or what they earn) and not their software. Purchasing companies aren't paying X billion dollars for the code and assets. They are paying for the users. (Which, I also think is kind of obvious).
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  The users without the software have no value though. If you could theoretically sell just the user base would it be worth as much? It’s more like the user base and network effects are a multiplier of the software value.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Right, in that case I completely agree with you.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Well it can be users and/or features. A feature might give you an advantage in your bundle that you can't otherwise build.
- bluecalm 6y ago
  As proven by among others Zoom, Whatsapp and now Discord if you build good software people will switch to it. I think you're undervaluing how good the software is. They are 5 years old, started from 0 user base and now they are a huge player and getting bigger by the day. You would have a point if there was something remotely close in quality on the market but not as popular but there just isn't. Discord is the first communication platform which doesn't suck in some obvious way. If Microsoft manage to buy it for 10B and not mess it up it will be one of their best acquisitions.

tomnipotent 6y ago

Complexity of software is not necessarily the only important dimension of determining value. The game industry is larger than both music and movies combined. Discord is behind almost every gaming community I've run into the last five years, from Eve Online to Valheim and Smash Bros. Looking for a Discord community is one of the first things I do when playing a new multiplayer game. Same with hundreds of millions of other gamers. You can't program your way into that kind of market adoption.

charcircuit 6y ago
That's his point. The main value is the userbase and not the software itself.
- xmprt 6y ago
  That's about as profound as saying the value in Coke is the people buying it and not their secret formula and bottling machines.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I never said it was profound, in fact, I said it was obvious. I called it a "trivial observation" - but it matters if you don't realize it. The Discord software isn't being bought and isn't worth 10 billion, probably not even 1 billion, but rather the totality of what Discord is (brand, users, data, etc).
  - usrusr 6y ago
    That's called brand and in one way or the other, in postindustrialized societies most people seem to work in that field (e.g. everything that is funded by ads is effectively part of the supply chain). "The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)

bluecalm 6y ago

Well, Microsoft has more engineers, money and can hire top talent. They also had a huge headstart in user base and adoption. What did they manage to come up with in a chat/collaboration space? Right - a total mess. Discord didn't "happen to get users". It made a platform people started using despite huge network/entrenchment effect of other players because it's so much better than everything else. I've learnt about Discord following open source projects and moved mine to it as well. It's fantastic, much much better than anything else on the market. Zoom is valued at 100b. Discord for 10 is just a steal. Coming back to your question: even if you multiply it by 10 and add infinite acquisition resources the team would most likely never be able to recreate Discord.

hu3 6y ago

You seem to think Discord can be recreated by throwing people and money at the problem. History shows it cannot. Discord is on another league in terms of technical and usability excellence when compared to competition.

Supermancho 6y ago
History shows that Large Companies tend to fail when recreating products because of internal politics and initiatives (outside of the core goal), not because they physically can't.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Aeolun 6y ago

> If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software. I think the problem is that this random group of people could never create Discord. They could create a superficially similar chat application, but it’s just as likely to be worse as better.

matkoniecz 6y ago

> If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software. If someone wants software now, rather than in 450 years it may be worth paying a premium.